Weather Report
Sweetnighter

When a group has a very extensive discography, characterized by countless quality peaks, it is easy to underestimate some recordings in favor of others, perhaps due to not being released in the right year or the right climate: the same assumption applies to Weather Report, and in particular to the album 'Sweetnighter', among the most underrated in their discography.

Music critics often note how the first two albums of Zawinul's band (the self-titled and I Sing the Body Electric) acted as a bridge between the electric jazz with Davisian influences and the more mature fusion of jazz, funk, rock, and world music that characterizes the quintet's albums from Mysterious Traveller onwards: in doing this operation, it is too often forgotten about the album being reviewed here, in which the group demonstrates they have definitively surpassed genre boundaries and shows a personality and coherence of intent never seen in previous recordings.
In my opinion, 'Sweetnighter' is, indeed, among the best productions of the group, captured in the ascending phase of their career, before their definitive explosion with critics and the public, and the subsequent crystallization of their style into the well-defined coordinates starting from Tale Spinnin' onwards.

Zawinul, Shorter and the first bassist Miroslav Vitous, demonstrate, in the album, a decisive desire to abandon the previously well-trodden paths by continuing on a path dominated by sounds produced by the Austrian author's synthesizers, with expressionist and pictorial tones, the complex melodic lines of the winds, and, not least, the underlying harmonies of the bass, capable at the same time of supporting the other instruments as well as tracing the harmonic evolution of each piece. A special mention must be made for the percussion by Dom Um Romao and Maruga, whose South American tones give warmth and pathos to the individual tracks, making the development of the songs even more dynamic. Alongside the group's founders, the contributions of bassist Andrew Withe (perhaps more at ease than Vitous in the electronic atmosphere that pervades the album) cannot be forgotten, along with drummers Eric Gravatt and Herschel Dwellingam.

The aspect that, at a first listen, allows 'Sweetnighter' to be distinguished from every other Weather Report album is also, in the opinion of the writer, the greater accessibility of the pieces written and composed by the group, even for those who do not come from the ranks of jazz enthusiasts and have a sort of reverential fear towards approaching more complex and less immediate music genres compared to the canonical rock, pop, and blues.
In this, the album can well represent the ideal gateway to an "other" world compared to the prevailing trends of the '70s, in full compliance with the group's purposes, which wanted to bring the rock crowd closer to the more rarefied atmospheres of jazz and avant-garde music.

If the "educational" function of Weather Report's music can perhaps bring a smile (albeit not without bitterness given the devolution of consumer music over the past three decades), there is nothing to say about the effectiveness and beauty of this album, whose listening is recommended to everyone... both the well-mannered and not.